A married woman now, nearing thirty, with a beautiful child alive in my arms and a body that had been flayed, publicly, indifferently exposed, not to mention a memory of that solid, unyielding door—death’s door, yes, as I thought of it—remembering for a moment, with a stir in my spine, the exposed breast, lit as if from within, and Walter Hartnett’s mouth moving toward me.
Tom came to the apartment after work and had dinner with us, usually with the baby in his arms, and then sat in the living room holding my hand, chatting and chatting in his cheerful way, only, reluctantly, lifting his hat and kissing us both goodbye when I got up to go to bed. I followed him to the door—I was still to avoid stairs—but more often than not, Gabe walked him to his car. Gabe said, in the first days of this routine, he did it because Tom seemed such a lonely soul, going back alone to our apartment in Queens, but I began to suspect my brother had another intention in accompanying poor Tom down the stairs. There was the matter, after all, of the doctor’s injunction. I must not have another child.
When we were alone in the apartment, my mother said, “There is the ring. There was once a woman who lived on Joralemon, above the Chehabs’ bakery, who you could go to for the thing. But the right doctor could tell you as well. There is the sheath, if Tom will oblige. You can take your temperature every morning and keep a record. You can sleep in separate beds or separate rooms, and if he comes to you in the night, you can say”—she lifted her nose into the air—“ ‘And who’ll raise this baby when I’m dead?’ You can sleep with a soup spoon under your pillow and give him a whack with the back of it—I don’t have to tell you where.” Which got us laughing like girls. My mother knew things she had never spoken of before.
In the kitchen, the bustling sounds of diapers boiling, bottles roiling in the speckled pot.
My mother said, “When the priest came to your bed that night, I told Gabe to send him away. All day I’d been watching out the window, and it may be that I had sun spots still in my eyes, but I didn’t like the look of him, that priest. In his black suit with his tiny bag. I’d been looking out the window all day. I watched the sun grow strong and I counted the shadows as the whole day went by, and I had on my mind that it was nighttime when your father died in this very same place. While you and I were home and asleep, and Gabe was asleep at the rectory. Slipped away in the night when none of us was near. I know I was afraid of the night coming, as frightened as any child. I was afraid that it was in the night that you would slip away from us, too.”
We were at the familiar table, my mother in her usual chair, folding the diapers she had just taken from the line. The summer heat had abated, but the window was still open. I was sitting at Gabe’s end of the table, to avoid the draft. I had the baby on my shoulder.
“The priest, to my eyes, seemed very dark in his suit,” my mother said, “with his little black bag, standing in the doorway and then coming toward your bed. I told Gabe to send him away. He was upset with me. He steered the man by his elbow, just out into the hall, and then he came back in and said that this was something we must do for you, to assure you’d get into heaven. The last rites. He was very serious. You know how he can be. A sacrament, he kept saying, as if I had forgotten.” She raised her chin, in some imitation of the defiance with which she had met Gabe’s words. “I hadn’t forgotten,” she said. “I just didn’t like the looks of the man, coming toward your bed like that. A black-suited banshee. I was desperate with the fear that I’d lose you.
“I said to Gabe, ‘She’s a young woman just after giving birth to her first child, who’s going to keep her out of heaven?’ I said to him, ‘How do you know she won’t see him praying over her and give up the fight?’ I said to him finally, ‘You’re a priest, aren’t you? You’re still a priest. Send that blaggard away and give her the blessing yourself. Didn’t you do as much for your poor father?’”
My mother, telling it, put her fingertips to her lips. The morning sunlight touched her downy cheek and crossed her lap where the white diapers were neatly arrayed. The lace curtain, her handiwork, stirred. “Which was terrible of me,” she said. “Reminding him of that heartache.” She looked at me. My mother wore glasses by then, and her salt-and-pepper hair was neatly permed. No longer for her the long graying braids of the immigrant. “He was barely ordained,” she said. “It was a terrible thing to have asked him to do at the time, and it was a terrible thing to throw in his face just because that mincing black priest made me angry.” She took another clean diaper from the basket on the table, folded it neatly.
The baby began to fuss, and I stood. I rubbed my fingers up and down his spine. I hadn’t known this, that it was my brother who had given my father the last sacrament. It made perfect sense, of course—Gabe was at his first parish then—but the time was a blur and I would not have thought until now to turn my imagination to it. Once, early on, my father had stood at a hospital window and waved to me out in the street—just a pale image behind the high-up glass—but my last real glimpse of him had been at this table, with the sabotaged soda bread, my own childish effort to stop time, in his hand.
I said to my mother, “I didn’t know.”
My mother nodded. “It was a terrible thing to have him do,” she said. And she dropped her hands into her lap, as if from sheer weariness. “Terrible for him.”
She said, “He was all of what, twenty-three? Barely ordained. And your father so wasted by then. His bowels coming up to his throat, if you want to know the worst of it.” She fluttered her thin hand from her breast to her chin to illustrate.
I didn’t want to know the worst of it.
“Even as Gabe was putting the holy oil on him, the poor man was heaving and choking. Cruel. That cancer. Cruel of me to make Gabe go through it. I should have banned him from the room.”
“I don’t remember,” I said, moving to a corner of the dining room to avoid the draft from the open window—ever vigilant now against drafts, missteps, scalding water. I was a mother now and all the terrible things that could maul a child, snatch him from the world, had bared their teeth and trained their yellow eyes on me. The baby was warmly asleep against my shoulder. “I hardly remember that time at all,” I said.
My father a pale figure in the hospital window. All those strangers passing through the lobby, some crying, some carrying armloads of flowers. And then Fagin’s benign shadow. The Mc-Geevers with their mouths full of broken teeth standing over the coffin in the living room, telling someone in the crowd that a man so thin was a walking invitation to misfortune. And then that sweet sleep in the car on the way home from Calvary, one of the sweetest sleeps I’d ever known. Gabe in his collar then, looking down at me, his red eyes puzzled. “You slept? How could you have slept?”
“A blessing for you,” my mother said. “Not to remember.” And she once again touched her lips. “It was my fault, asking him. The poor child’s hands were trembling and the tears were running down his face. And your father was choking back the black bile, trying to encourage him. Trying to help him with the Latin.” She put her fingertips to her chin. “Moving his lips like he used to do when Gabe said his poems. Moving his lips because he couldn’t speak. There was a terrible odor. Rot and bile. The man’s body wasted to nothing. Radium was what they gave him to drink. Poison. His face a skull. The dear man.”
With her hand to her chin she paused and closed her eyes again. I could hear the water boiling in the pots on the stove. I could hear the traffic in the street outside.